"Let us concentrate on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do"

Saturday, 5 November 2016

Computational Musicology, ????, Profit

This year I had the pleasure of attending FARM at ICFP. As well as demoing Klangmeister, I gave a paper on what computational musicology means for the study of music. The abstract is as follows:

In this paper I examine the relationship that complexity theory anddisjunctive sequences have to music, music-generating programsand literary works. I then apply these ideas by devising a programto generate an infinite ‘Copyright Infringement Song’ that containsall other songs within it. I adopt literary modes of analysis andpresentation, which I motivate by arguing that music is a culturaland artistic phenomenon rather than a natural one.

Most of the FARM papers focused more on general analysis of the structure of music than the interpretation of the meaning of specific pieces. I find the general analytic approach fascinating, but as I argue in my paper, I think computational musicology can be more than that.

I'm grateful to the FARM organisers for accepting a work that is a little loose with the genre conventions of a computer science paper. ICFP is a great conference, but its usual standard of worthwhile research is inherited from mathematics and the sciences. With notable exceptions like James Noble's work on postmodern programming, I don't see many examples of academics employing computational thinking for humanities research.